Thursday, 1 August 2013

Gone Pickin'

Yesterday I packed up the girlies and headed out to a PYO farm (pick your own) to pick strawberries. I was sooooo happy my friend invited us to go and to drive. Her daughter goes to nursery with Lois and it sounded like a great playdate outing. We get out and about quite a bit for a no-car family, but it's a totally liberating feeling to hop in a car and go someplace quickly after not hoping in a car and going someplace quickly very often (we're working on the license thing). For our PYO day out we went to Hewitt's farm in Kent. The weather was perfect for berry picking--a bit overcast and very mild. They had plenty of produce available for picking, but we went for strawberries and moved on to have a picnic afterwards. The weather was also great for photos. I took the opportunity to use our new-ish little camera, a Sony DSC RX100. It's a fantastic camera. I'm so impressed with the quality. And it's so little! For the photo above, I had Ellie strapped on, and she was very squirmy. It was hard to tell if the photo was crisp and clear. I didn't take the time to zoom in and check the photos because I was also trying to distract Ellie and pick strawberries. Zooming in on them on my computer, I can easily make out the little clear furs on the stems. So nice! I hardly ever use this camera because I've just gotten in the lazy habit of iPhone photos. We bought it because our Canon is so big and heavy that we wanted something light but also high quality with the idea that we'd bring it out more often with us. I am still impressed with iPhone photos though, and old habits do die hard. I think filters and apps like Instagram are really fun. The strawberry above is the same as this one below, but the one below is taken with my phone. I like the angle a bit more in the iPhone picture. What do you think? Do you prefer iPhone, Instagram sort of photos, or "real" photos?

Two more with little Sony.

And the rest here below are with my phone. I just took a few with little Sony but I'm definitely going to take more with it on my next outing.

And last night I made some mediocre strawberry ice cream. It turned out fairly icy. I definitely need some ice cream lessons, so I've ordered this book to help me. Did I mention I got an ice cream maker for my birthday? I have to re-read my own blog to know what I've said! Anyway, I'll do another post about that soon, but I'm so happy to have the ice cream maker. We've made a few nice things so far, but the strawberry one wasn't tops. So that's the scoop for today.